I'm terrified of getting lost. I have recurring nightmares about taking the wrong bus and not knowing how to get home. I have no sense of direction. Never mind east and west, I mix up left and right. I got through school by following other students because I couldn't find classrooms on my own. I once absent-mindedly turned the wrong way leaving the university building I went to every weekday for years and instantly became lost.
Possibly because of this crippling inability to recognise my own surroundings, I really like getting lost in open-world games.
Morrowind
Morrowind is covered in perpetual fog and ash and blight. You can never see a damn thing. You'll be stumbling around in a red blight storm, barely able to see your own hands, constantly assaulted by cliffracers, praying you've picked the right foyada to walk down. Finally you see a door in the mountainside and throw yourself at it in desperate gratitude - only to realise this cave is named Sharapli instead of Sanabi and you definitely took a wrong turn. Or maybe that guild leader straight up gave you the wrong directions. (This really happens at least once in the game.)
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At the time Morrowind usually came with a paper map on which the towns, ruins, caves, shipwrecks etc are drawn. I didn't get this map, so I was even more lost than most players. There's an ingame map which starts blank, and a minimap the size of a postage stamp.
Morrowind's walking speed is notoriously, abominably slow. I didn't care. I spent many happy hours walking from Seyda Neen to Pelagiad to Lake Amaya to Moonmoth Fort to Balmora. I could navigate Balmora blindfolded. I find it easy to rush around in games, ignoring my surroundings and doing quests as fast as possible. The incredibly slow pace of Morrowind forces me to absorb what I'm looking at and enjoy it. (I like slow films too. Stalker (Tarkovsky) is my favourite film, with many shots lasting for more than four minutes. I think I'm just really bad at looking and have to be forced to do it.)
The way in which transport and teleportation are properly woven into the fabric of the game and world makes Morrowind far superior to most open-world games. There is no normal fast travel. There are silt striders, local boats that will take you to nearby coastal towns or to the various cantons of Vivec, a larger ship that can take you to Solstheim, mages guilds that will instantly teleport you to other mages guilds for a fee, spells that can teleport you to the nearest temple, spells that can mark a location and teleport you back there later, and crystals that will teleport you between Dwemer strongholds. Certain locations require levitation spells or potions; there's just no other way to get up there. To cross mountains you can levitate or just jump incredibly high (good luck with sticking the landing, though). There are the pretty much essential Boots of Blinding Speed, which increase the painful walking speed but also make the screen completely black (unless, of course, you figure out how to resist magic when you put them on). Characters will give you directions, not quest markers. Some locations are intentionally confusing: Daedric shrines are full of bizarre geometry, and Vivec's cantons are composed of identical blank corridors in multiple layers which seem designed to make you feel like a bumbling tourist.
One optional quest has you perform a silent pilgrimage across almost the entire map. This means no transportation, since you can't talk to anyone. You're sort of intended to 'cheat' (there's a shrine nearby which will allow you to levitate for a long time), but you can also choose to walk it. I love committing to boring journeys like this. Let me walk!
The result of all this slow, painful landscape traversal is that I feel more at home in Morrowind than anywhere on Earth.
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Kingdom Come
Kingdom Come Deliverance takes it a step further by removing the compass and player indicator on the map in hardcore mode. You can see the map, but you don't know where you are on it. Landmarks like roadside shrines, beehives, merchants and cart wrecks will be automatically marked on the map when you encounter them (I try not to think about how this means Henry knows exactly where he is and he's just choosing not to tell me). You can use the sun or stars to find the cardinal directions if it's not too cloudy. You also have to eat and sleep, so if you're lost too long you might really be in danger.
I spent an entire ingame night once plodding around a pitch-dark forest in the rain looking for belladonna. I had a torch which illuminated about three feet in front of me. Every rabbit scurrying out of the undergrowth made me jump. When the sky started to lighten I wanted to head back. I knew the vague location of a roadside shrine which sort of told me where I was, but I picked a direction more from intuition than logic. I stumbled through the bushes until finally emerged at the top of a hill, with the sun just beginning to rise, and right in front of me far in the grey distance was one of the towers of Rattay. I'd gone in the right direction, I'd emerged almost perfectly where I went in, and I knew exactly where I was looking. The rain stopped, the sun began to rise, and I trotted back to Rattay with golden sunlight reflecting off every puddle feeling like the king of Bohemia.
Early in the game you go to a hunting camp with your pal Hans, and you split up to compete at hunting rabbits. I felt like an unparalleled genius when I managed to find my way back to the camp by using the location and flow of a nearby river. I felt like I should have gotten an achievement and a gold medal for it. Combat is fine, but the thrill of coming home is unbeatable.
At first I opened the map every five seconds. I then found it really satisfying when I started remembering longer strings of directions in the same style that an ingame character might tell me them: go along this road until you see a conciliation cross tucked into the trees, turn left at the crossroads just ahead, cross the river at the rocks, then look for an overgrown path heading into the woods... after even longer I just started heading south and trusting that I'd find my way more precisely once I got closer to my destination. it's also incredibly satisfying when you start to recognise your surroundings, or when you see a familiar building in the distance and you can just head towards it by sight.
I felt like I started actually seeing the game for the first time. My eyes weren't fixed on a minimap or compass. I didn't remember Uzhitz being so beautiful, up on a gentle hill surrounded by tiered fields. I'd never really looked up before to see whether I could find Rattay or Talmberg on the horizon. I often woke up early in the morning because of Henry's nightmares (which give penalties to stats for two hours), so I'd ride aimlessly outside town and try to catch the sunrise from a nice spot. Every time I had to ride through unfamiliar territory at night, especially through woods, I felt a primal relief at seeing the friendly lit torches of houses through the trees at last. Landmarks, roads, torches, buildings, the sun itself - all these things become functional rather than dismissable aesthetic details when you're having to find your way.
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Stalker: Call of Pripyat
My favourite feature of this game is emissions/blowouts. You'll be wandering about doing your stuff when a storm will draw in, sirens will sound, the radio will warn you, and you'd better drop whatever you're doing and run for shelter now. If you're too late, the sky will turn red, weird shit will happen, and you will die.
I remember panicking and cowering in a toll booth, which didn't protect me at all, and I died there. I remember panicking high up on some ruined machinery, having to drop half my inventory over the edge just to be able to run, scrambling down to safety. I remember panicking at nighttime, running in any direction, falling down a chasm and breaking my legs but saving my life. I remember sheltering in the attic of some old building, crouching under the beams and hearing the wind whip outside.
It's easy enough to find your way around an open world with a map when you have all the time in the world. Your PDA even gives you the nearest safe locations during an emission. But doing it suddenly under time pressure makes the world into an entirely different place.
Please remove my damn map marker
I desperately want more open world games which are designed to be played without no player map marker, no minimap and no quest arrow. I'm wondering how open worlds I didn't particularly like, like RDR2's, would have fared with less handholding. I'm even wondering what it would be like to have a modern open-world game with no map at all, where your only in-game recourse would be to ask NPCs for directions and you could draw your own map if you wanted to. Drawing maps used to be part of the fun of text adventure games - why not go full circle?